A police K-9 officer and his bomb sniffing partner do an exterior search of a high school in Grangeville, Idaho. / Steve Hanks, AP

by Greg Toppo, USA TODAY

by Greg Toppo, USA TODAY

In the wake of last month's the Dec. 14 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, many school-safety advocates are pushing for an increased police presence in schools.

Students in Los Angeles last week saw the first patrols by uniformed officers, newly assigned to every school.

In Arizona, Gov. Jan Brewer on Monday is expected to ask state lawmakers to use a portion of an expected budget surplus to train school police officers.

In Newtown, Conn., a few parents say the sight of uniformed officers is a comfort to children. Superintendent Janet Robinson has said she wants the police presence to continue.

But a few advocates for children aren't sold on the idea.

The Advancement Project, a Washington, D.C.-based civil rights group, has long complained that armed officers in schools actually make safety worse for many kids, making it more likely that they'll end up in trouble with the law. The group on Friday proposed that schools develop long-term safety plans and invest funding that would otherwise go to more police into conflict resolution and better access to mental health services for students.

The group tracked school referrals to Florida's juvenile justice system in 2010-11 and found that of 16,400 referrals, 69% were for misdemeanors. "Students aren't being arrested in school for safety concerns," Dianis said. "Those referrals are for things like disorderly conduct."

Police posted to schools are rarely called upon to protect students from outside attacks, she said. "When it doesn't happen and they're sitting there for years, they find something else to do." So they become the de facto disciplinary arm of the school, she said. In many cases they end up having a detrimental impact "on young people that they were intended to protect."

The NAACP on Friday said enhanced police presence in schools "is not a panacea for preventing the violence we saw" in Newtown, Conn. "Instead, adding police and armed security to schools often means that normal student behavior becomes criminalized."

As early as Dec. 18, a group representing student mental health organizations and practitioners released a joint statement saying, "Inclinations to intensify security in schools should be reconsidered. We cannot and should not turn our schools into fortresses."

The groups' position is actually backed up by the public: Only 41% support a National Rifle Association proposal to put armed police officers in schools, according to a Public Policy Polling survey released last week.

The topic was the subject of congressional hearings just three days before the Dec. 14 shooting, with Dianis testifying that school discipline is "increasingly handled by law enforcement, and today, students are more likely to be arrested for minor in-school offenses." She noted that the U.S. Education Department's Office for Civil Rights found that suspension and expulsion rates have nearly doubled in the past 30 years. Each year, she said, over 3 million students are suspended and over 100,000 students are expelled. "It has not made our schools safer; it has not improved the quality of schools; and it is a significant contributor to the dropout crisis and student achievement gap," she told lawmakers.

Dianis noted a 2012 case from Georgia, in which a kindergartner was handcuffed and arrested for throwing a tantrum, and another from New York in which a 13-year-old was handcuffed and removed from school in 2007 for writing the word "okay" on her school desk.

Her testimony â?? as well as that of an Obama administration assistant secretary of education, got a warm reception from Democratic Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin, who chaired the hearing. "For many young people," Durbin said at the outset of the hearing, "our schools are increasingly a gateway to the criminal justice system."

After the shooting, some school districts around the country asked police departments to increase patrols. "A barrier has been broken in our culture" by the shootings, Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said last month. "It's our job ... all of our jobs, to make sure that we resurrect that barrier and make our children safe." In Los Angeles, officers will rotate daily through each of the city's 600-plus schools.

Many districts are revisiting safety plans and looking at issues such as whether school resource officers traditionally at middle and high schools should be deployed to elementary schools, said Francisco Negron, general counsel for the National School Boards Association.

In a position paper released Wednesday, The American Federation of Teachers said police in schools "should be part of the fabric of the school community, not simply a stationed armed guard."

John Bello, a Newtown, Conn., real estate developer, said his 7-year-old-son, who lost two friends in the shooting at Sandy Hook, has been happy to see the police officers stationed at Head O'Meadow Elementary School since the shooting. "I said, 'Did you see the police?' and he said, 'Yeah, that's good,'" Bello said.

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy has convened a task force to review state laws and policies affecting guns, mental health and school safety, but during his State of the State address on Wednesday, he told a joint session of the General Assembly, "Freedom is not a handgun on the hip of every teacher, and security should not mean a guard posted outside every classroom."

Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) held a roundtable discussion about curbing gun violence today in Hartford, Conn. At the meeting, hosted by Blumental and Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), community leaders, law enforcement personnel, and elected officials talked about, among other things, keeping schools safe.

When asked whether he would support more police officers and security guards being stationed at schools, Blumenthal said such efforts could be one of several ways to reduce gun violence. Armed guards as well as better checks on school entrances, better emergency exits and better procedures for going on lockdown could all help, he said.

"Local school boards must do what they think is most appropriate but some kind of security presence in a school can be a significant deterrent," he said. "The killer in Newtown shot himself when he saw police approaching the school. If there had been police presence or some security presence--whether armed or unarmed---there might have been a deterrent effect."

Dianis said the Newtown shooting was a tragedy, but that "police are not the answer."

The group hopes to dissuade the White House from proposing more police in schools. "If that becomes the answer, we're going to be in more of a quagmire than we've been in," she said. "Having an armed guard at every school is not going to give us the safety that we need over the long haul."